America’s Need for Involved Black Men

“Meet the Press” did a special show with Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, authors of the just-published Come on People. The book presents some startling facts:

In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Now, roughly 70% of black babies are born each year to single mothers. . . Some black women simply don’t want to marry the fathers of their babies because these men appear to have little else to offer beyond the sperm. . . Currently, in college and professional schools, black women outnumber black men two to one. . . In poor communities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school. . . By 2004, the unemployed share of black male high school dropouts in their twenties had increased to a preposterous 72%, almost four times more than among Hispanic dropouts. . . Society keeps laying the problem on the “unwed mother.” You never hear anything about the “unwed father.” We have to talk more about these men and to these men if we are ever to see them assume their responsibilities as men.

Enough young black males behave badly at an early age that they set the norm for other black boys. Check the numbers:

 Homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between fifteen and twenty-nine years of age and has been for decades.
 Of the roughly 16,000 homicides in this country each year, more than half are committed by black men. A black man is seven times more likely to commit a murder (excluding military actions) than a white man, and six times more likely to be murdered. (Black mothers live with these numbers. We don’t know how they sleep at night.)
 94% of all black people who are murdered are murdered by other black people.
 Although black people make up just 12% of the general population, they make up nearly 44% of the prison population.
 At any given time, as many as one in four of all young black men are in the criminal justice system—in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole.
 By the time they reach their midthirties, six out of ten black high school dropouts have spent time in prison.
 About one-third of the homeless are black men.